Natural Hazards

My love of all things NASA had me surfing around their website(s) the other day when I stumbled across a very interesting section on Natural Hazards.  I was amazed at what I found.  Check out the views from orbit of many natural disasters under their categorical headers of Fires, Severe Storms, Dust, Smoke, and Haze, Floods, Volcanoes and Earthquakes, Crops and Drought.  Of course, being a tabletop gamer, it also got me thinking about how much I might need to include in my own campaign setting.  The images will absolutely stun you.  Warning: These images are also large and very detailed.

A dust storm in the Middle East.

Fires in Australia.

Flooding in India.

Excellent Map Resource

The University of Portsmouth website has compiled some excellent old world maps deep in the bowels of their geography pages that are well worth checking out if you plan to do any gaming cartography for your tabletop roleplaying game campaign and setting.  In particular, take a look at their sections on Old Sussex and Old Hampshire.  Here are some examples . . .

6 Tons of Dead Weight

With all the stuff orbiting the Earth, it's actually amazing that more of it doesn't fall on folks much more often.  Sure, a lot of it burns up upon re-entry and the oceans are big, but there's a lot of stuff that falls to the Earth both manmade and otherwise.  Anyway, a NASA satelite was expected to fall into the Pacific ocean last night, though about 1,200 pounds of the six tons was likely to make it through the atmosphere, with the largest surviving portion expected to be around three hundred pounds.  Some believe that parts of it might manage to strike the West Coast up in Washington or Canada but nothing reported seemed to indicate that happened.  Read more here.

Megafauna

Often overlooked for Medieval Fantasy campaign settings is the placement of megafauna.  It's an element that's easy to integrate which has both a familiar yet alien feel.  Unlike more tranditional monsters from roleplaying game manuals, which require more consideration to place and explain, megafauna can be woven into regular biomes with only slightly more consideration than typical animal life.  And, of course, they are inherently awesome.

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

Here's an exercise in world-building.  Imagine the campaign world you have made from orbit.  Here's a little help, in the form of time-lapsed footage from the International Space Station of our own planet.

NASA's Kepler Discovery Confirms First Planet Orbiting Two Stars

Science Daily reports that NASA's Kepler Discovery has confirmed spotting the first circumbinary planet, a known to be orbiting a two stars.  Though cold and gaseous, and therefore not thought to support life, the planet is the first of its kind to be definitely detected.  Apparently, most stars in our galaxy are binary systems so the discovery of the planet increases the odds that there are other worlds we could one day find and explore, though that day is likely a very long way off.  Read more here.

Hex Mapping

Take a good look at Trollsmyth's Hex Mapping series of blog posts starting with #1 from July 25th, 2011.  He does his best to leave no stone unturned!  It's, so far, a 17 part series, divided into digestable blog-chunks.  He begins with some overarching concepts and then lays out his own process step-by-step as he geographically sets up a hex-crawling landscape then populates the environs with the creatures and cultures that can be encountered.  Blog #14 and #15 where he gets into what exporers can see and random features are particularly interesting.  Enjoy the whole series and stay tuned for more!